Most globes are maps of the Earth. They have the advantage of avoiding the distortions of flat map projections. The most common types are political and physical. Political globes show countries. Physical globes show landscape like mountains and rivers. Some globes are star charts and some are maps of distant worlds.

Global as an adjective is used to mean the entire world rather than any special place. It is also used in fields like computers to mean dealing with a whole larger system, rather than its individual little parts.

Mass-produced globes are typically covered by a printed paper map. The most common type has long, thin gores (strips) of paper. These strips narrow to a point at the North Pole and the South Pole. Then a small disk is used to paper over the irregularities at the poles. The more gores there are, the less stretching and crumpling is needed to make the paper map fit the sphere.

From a geometric point of view, all points on a sphere are the same. One could select any point on the planet, and create a paper map that covers the globe with strips that come together at that point and the opposite point.

An Earth globe is usually mounted at a 23.5° angle on bearings. This mounting represents the axial tilt of the spinning planet, in relation to its sun. This makes it easy to visualize how days and seasons change.